Contexto

“So I offer Liam this picture: my two daughters running on the sandy rim of a stony beach, under a slow, turbulent sky, the shoulders of their coats shrugging behind them. Then I erase it. I close my eyes and roll with the sea’s loud static.

When I open them again, it is to call the girls back to the car”

“ when my grandmother walked in through the door. His baby eyes. His two black pupils, into which the double image of Ada Merriman walked and sat. She was wearing blue, or so I imagine it.

Her blue self settled in the grey folds of his brain, and it stayed there for the rest of his life”

“But this is 1925. A man. A woman. She must know what lies ahead of them now. She knows because she is beautiful. She knows because of all the things that have happened since. She knows because she is my Granny, and when she put her hand on my cheek

I felt the nearness of death and was comforted by it.”

“ I was opening the car door for the girls one day before Liam died and, as it swung past, I saw my reflection in the window. It disappeared, and I looked into the dark cave of the car as the kids came out, or went back in to pick some piece of pink plastic junk off the floor. Then the reflection swung back again, swiftly, as I shut the door. The sun was breaking through high-contrast clouds, the sky in the window pane was a wonderful, thick blue, and in my dark face moving past was the streak of a smile.

And I remember thinking, ‘So, I am happy. That’s nice to know’”

“If you ask me what my brother looked like after he was dead, I can tell you that he looked like Mantegna’s forshortened Christ, in paisley pijamas.

I was glad I had some practice in this whole business – the viewing business – because although I loved Charlie, it was with the easy, anxious love of a child, that is always ready to love someone new.”

“You might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones”

“ Liam’s mottled purple while Charlie’s was clear, because his body had already forgotten that it was winter, in that cold house. There are photographs. There is the hint of my brother’s smile in my own mirror, a tone of voice I sometimes hit.

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them, instead.”

“As I open the fridge, my mind is subject to jolts and lapses; the stair you miss as you fall asleep. I fell the future falling through the roof of my mind and when I look nothing is there. A rope. Something dangling in a bag, that I can not touch.”

“ I wait for the kind of sense that dawn makes, when you have not slept. I stay downstairs while the family breathes above me and I write it down, I lay them out in nice sentences, all my clean, white bones”

“That Christmas morning was as clean and crisp as it always is – my memory will not allow it to rain. But neither will it allow us home.”

“They had a story, Ada and Charlie, in which they each played the most important roles, and when she walked across the room to him, you could tell how fated they felt, as if their love was a great burden to them as well as a joy”

“I do not know why Ada married Charlie when it was Nugent who had her measure. And though you could say that she did not marry Nugent because she did not like him, that is not really enough.

We do not always like the people we love – we do not always have that choice.”